When Glandice Morgan sets about a piece of Wagner, it is less like a lark ascending than a drill hitting masonry: her top C the vocal equivalent of maximum torque. Douglas, unable to take the strain any longer, has removed to the vegetable patch at the bottom of the vicarage garden, which is mercifully out of range. It is unusually mild for late October, and not only is he wearing his favourite tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, but Alison’s bonfire is still crackling gently and giving off the occasional swirl of sweet smoke. He looks at the garden fork stuck at an angle into the earth between the two neat rows of leeks and wills a Robin to land on the handle. It doesn’t. But it’s pretty damn good, all the same.
Douglas balances his mug of tea on the arm of the bench, leans back against the wooden slats and opens his book. He is reading a very interesting account of 15th-century Florentine Sacre Rappresentazioni by P. O. Flanhandy, S.J. He is particularly interested in the special effects used in these popular religious dramas: candles in coloured jars suspended high above the stage; small boys in taffeta tunics lowered on winches from specially constructed platforms; holy doves shot down wires amongst exploding fireworks. He is, of course, thinking of his own modern day mystery play, only now he’s wondering whether it wouldn’t be rather wonderful to reconstruct one of these sacred spectacles in Tendringhoe’s own, very beautiful 15th-century church, perhaps as a play within a play.
It is as he muses on this thought that Alison catches sight of him through the kitchen window. There he is, her husband the Vicar of Tendringhoe, his commanding physical stature evident even as he pours over his text, every inch the scholar. He had his nose in a book the first time she saw, him, almost 25 years ago, at a residential trumpet workshop for Christians in the Brecon Beacons: Baudelaire’s Fleur du Mal, she remembers, in the original French of course, but using his Derby County season ticket as a book mark - that was so Douglas!
Alison peels off her yellow marigolds and hangs them over the edge of the sink to dry. She looks again with satisfied approval at her husband as he sits amongst the mellow fruitfulness of the Vicarage garden. His mind might be lost in anything, she thinks to herself pleasurably: speculative theology, early Byzantine church music, renaissance art, and she’s not far wrong, for Reverend Carduggan is indeed rummaging around in all these areas of learning in order to find something with which he might legitimise the oddly persistent image of Michael Glebe suspended from the rafters of St Maggie’s in nothing but a rudely short taffeta tunic.
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